"The government is trying to move the goal posts -- shifting the court's inquiry from whether they are collecting the data to whether they are 'reviewing' it," says Cindy Cohn, Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been in litigation against the NSA for dragnet surveillance since 2008 and which is party to one of the recently-filed lawsuits. "Your rights are violated when the government gets access to your phone records, regardless of what they do with them afterwards."

In any case, Cohn does not believe that the government is merely warehousing most of the phone records it collects. "I think there's no doubt that the government is doing some scanning of the phone records that includes all of them," she says. "I suspect by 'review' they mean some sort of human review, but again, that's not when the violation occurs. No one seriously thinks that a computer search -- which can result in your prosecution or being subject to further review -- isn't just as violative of your privacy as a human search. And no one seriously thinks that they are just piling up phone records in a computer somewhere and not doing any sort of searches at all on them until some later date."

EFF has presented its full evidentiary case that the five ordinary Americans who are plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA were among the hundreds of millions of nonsuspect Americans whose communications and communications records have been touched by the government’s mass surveillance regimes. This presentation includes a new...

In the United States, a secret federal surveillance court approves some of the government’s most enormous, opaque spying programs. It is near-impossible for the public to learn details about these programs, but, as it turns out, even the court has trouble, too. According to new opinions obtained by EFF last...

UPDATE September 14, 2018: This blog has been updated at the bottom to include information about two Senators’ reactions to the NSA’s call detail record deletion. In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant? Straight from the agency’s...

Agron Hasbajrami is a U.S. resident who was arrested at JFK airport in 2011 on his way to Pakistan and charged with providing material support to terrorists. Although the government used Section 702, its warrantless Internet surveillance authority, to build its case against Hasbajrami, it withheld this fact from his...

Two reporters recently identified eight AT&T locations in the United States—towering, multi-story buildings—where NSA surveillance occurs on the backbone of the Internet. Their article showed how the agency taps into cables, routers, and switches that handle vast quantities of Internet traffic around the world. Published by The Intercept...

This week, 24 civil liberties organizations, including EFF and the ACLU, urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to report—as required by law—statistics that could help clear up just how many individuals are burdened by broad NSA surveillance of domestic telephone records. These records show who is calling whom and...

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the new nominee to direct the NSA, faced questions Thursday from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about how he would lead the spy agency. One committee member, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), asked the nominee if he and his agency could avoid the mistakes...

Once-secret surveillance court orders obtained by EFF last week show that even when the court authorizes the government to spy on specific Americans for national security purposes, that authorization can be misused to potentially violate other people’s civil liberties.
These documents raise larger questions about whether the government...